To-Do List: The Gaffe Campaign; Defining “Christian”

To know: Weekly unemployment claims fell to three hundred and fifty-nine thousand, a low not seen since April of 2008 … Florida Senator Marco Rubio endorsed Mitt Romney on “Hannity” Wednesday night … Apple C.E.O. Tim Cook visited a Foxconn plant in China where the iPhone is manufactured; Apple has been heavily criticized for the conditions at the factories … Only thirty-five per cent of conservatives say they have a “great deal of trust in science,” a new study says … Etch A Sketch has responded to its sudden popularity in the wake of a Romney aide’s gaffe by putting out new ads with a political theme.

Think of what you remember of the last week: The fact that Romney won Illinois and Jeb Bush’s endorsement? Or the fact that Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom used an ill-advised “Etch-a-Sketch” metaphor in a CNN interview? The gaffe, unscripted and surprising, endured. It simply mattered more to the national conversation. Go back a few presidential cycles, and the reverse would be true. The mainstream journalists, as filters, would have discounted the gaffe as what it was: A poorly worded restatement of conventional wisdom. The media filter would have focused on the primary win and the endorsement as the events that mattered.

Now think about the event that defined Obama’s visit to the South Korea: Was it President Obama’s scripted visit to the DMZ? His speech on nuclear security? His comments about Kim Jong Un? Or the fact that a live mic caught the president promising “more flexibility” on missile defense to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev? Obviously it is the last one, despite the fact that the New York Times and the Washington Post buried the news deep inside today’s papers. The gaffe is still ringing around the world. The photos of Obama on the border with North Korea are a distant memory….

The problem with all of this is that gaffes are often weak signifiers of what is really happening. They are, more often then not, taken out of context to exaggerate qualities or positions. As voters and reporters increasingly revert to them for information about what is going on in the campaign, there is a risk that the sort of substantive differences between the candidates get lost in the shuffle. But until news gathering and consumption changes again, there is probably nothing to be done.

Timothy Noah, on The New Republic’s Web site, takes issue with the definition of “Christian” in popular culture:

Every morning I wake up to National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” and this morning my first stirrings of consciousness concerned the new movie October Baby, about a young woman who finds out that she was adopted after her birth mother underwent a failed abortion. Ten percent of the film’s profits will be donated to an anti-abortion charity. NPR’s piece about October Baby (audio, text), described it as one of several “Christian” films that Hollywood studios have started churning out. Jon Erwin, who co-directed the film with his brother Andrew, told NPR that he was “raised in the South in a Christian home and family,” and that the values of many contemporary Hollywood films felt alien to him. Quoting The Hollywood Reporter’s Paul Bond, NPR observed that “Hollywood doesn’t like to leave money on the table,” and noted that Fox and Sony have set up subsidiaries to serve the niche “Christian” market.

As I lay in bed struggling to wake up I thought: Christian? Christians aren’t some twee boutique demographic. Christians represent the majority. About 78 percent of Americans self-identify as Christian, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. What NPR and Fox and Sony mean when they say “Christian” is “Christian right” or “Christian conservatives,” terms that adherents don’t like because they think they’re pejorative. “Fundamentalist” and “evangelical” are imperfect substitutes because a) the two categories, though they overlap a lot, aren’t precisely the same; and b) some of these folks consider themselves political liberals. (The worldly Cold War liberal Reinhold Niebuhr called himself an evangelical Protestant.) What conservative Christians really like to be called is “Christians.” Hence “Christian rock” and “Christian college” and now “Christian film.” This strikes me as terribly presumptuous. Bruce Springsteen was raised Catholic but he doesn’t perform anything these folks would accept as Christian rock. Wesleyan was founded by Methodists and named after John Wesley but evangelicals would never call it a Christian university. “Christian” has become a euphemism for “acceptable to the type of Christian (in most instances Protestant) who frowns on homosexuality and wishes Saul Alinsky had minded his own business.”

According to Pew, only about one-third of Christians call themselves “evangelicals.” That’s about 26 percent of all Americans. The other two-thirds self-identify as Catholics (23 percent) and with either mainline (18 percent) or historically black (7 percent) Protestantism. (A smattering of Mormons, Orthodox Christians, and other tiny subgroups make up the remaining 4 percent.) To suggest that conservative Christians are the only Christians is like saying Hasidic Jews are the only Jews. It’s a cartoonish misconception that the Christian right has managed to sell to a largely secular news media that’s too sensitive to accusations of anti-religious bias.

To watch: “Birth of a Book”:

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.